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Thoughts about economic and business issues by and for the NYU Stern community -- and others with similar interests. The content reflects the views of individual NYU faculty but not necessarily those of NYU. Comments and suggestions welcome. Special thanks to our tech consultant, MBA alum Tim Reilly.

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Comcast and Time Warner

Their proposed merger has most of us wondering what will happen to our local service. Andy Borowitz puts it this way: “A technician will be at your home between the hours of eight and never.”

Larry White tells me consumers aren’t the issue. Comcast and Time Warner are both essentially monopolies in their coverage areas, but there’s no overlap, so the merger won’t change that. What changes is that a major distributor of content gets bigger. Larry adds: “the issues will be whether the [new] entity will have monopsony power” over content providers (Netflix, ESPN) and whether the merger will heighten that power. He points us to the analysis of the Comcast-NBCUniversal merger in Kwoka and White.